Epistemographer

So, many people are blogging this better than I have the time or knowledge to do, but if you’ve been in a cave today, Atrios was essentially served with a cease and desist letter by blogger Donald Luskin today.

Seems that this might not be about simply stifling criticism, a la Fox v. Franken, but something more insidious. Atrios blogs under a pseudonym, and has been very protective of his privacy. Luskin’s threatening to go to Blogspot to force them to reveal Atrios’ identity (not that that is necessarily even possible), possibly in the hopes of outing him.

All sorts of interesting issues are gonna get churned up here…

I haven’t had much to say for the past few days, in part because I’m trying to focus all my writing energies on my dissertation (which has been growing steadily at the rate of about 1200 words per day, if you’ve been following the little tally to the right). Looks like I’ll be heading to Philadelphia tomorrow for two nights, to stretch my legs and hopefully go trick-or-treating with Jenny’s nephew (he keeps saying he doesn’t want to dress up in a costume, but I’ll believe it when I see it).

Good news is that I got two books in the mail today, one which I’m reviewing for Publisher’s weekly on the “discovery of the brain”, and the other for the 3rd Virtual Book Tour, in which I’ll be participating sometime in the next few weeks. As a preliminary plug, the book is Urban Tribes by Ethan Waters, and it looks like it’ll be a good read. I’ll be cooking up ideas for how to feature the book during the tour, which should be somewhere in mid-November.

As if switching up to Movable Type wasn’t enough, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall now has a modest proposal up on his site:

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to going to New Hampshire in January to cover the primary – probably for the last ten days or so before the actual vote on January 27th…

Now, the normal way to do this would be for me to go to one of the publications I write for, get them to pick up the tab (hotel room, transportation, etc.), and write it up for them.

But that would mean saving most of the reporting for some magazine or website or newspaper and not doing much or any of it for TPM. And, frankly, I think blog coverage is much better suited to covering something like the New Hampshire primary than magazines or newspapers…

I want to dedicate this trip entirely to blog coverage so I want to fund it with reader support, reader subscriptions.

Marshall is one of the top blogging journalists out there, and I’ve been wondering if he was going to take an Andrew Sullivan-like leap into funding his work through his readers, rather than subsidizing himself with more traditional print-media gigs. I kicked in a few bucks (sadly, all my grad student budget will allow), and I’m curious to see where this experiment will go.

UPDATE: Within 24 hours, Marhall’s already got more than enough cash. To be precise, he raised $4864 within less than 24 hours. You can count this as another example of the power of distributed small-scale fundraising…

So, the defamation lawsuit against Eminem was ruled in his favor. But here’s the great part:

“In a footnote to a 13-page opinion, Judge Deborah Servitto and her research staff added a 10-stanza rap verse to explain her ruling in a case in which DeAngelo Bailey claims he was defamed in an Eminem song.”

If you’re wondering exactly what the footnote said, here’s the text:

Mr. Bailey complains that his rep is trash
So he’s seeking compensation in the form of cash
Bailey thinks he’s entitled to some monetary gain
Because Eminem used his name in vain

Eminem says Bailey used to throw him around
Beat him up in the john, shoved his face in the ground
Eminem contends that his rap is protected
By the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment

Eminem maintains that the story is true
And that Bailey beat him black and blue
In the alternative he states that the story is phony
And that a reasonable person would think it’s baloney

The court must always balance the rights
Of a defendant and one placed in a false light
If the plaintiff presents no question of fact
To dismiss is the only acceptable act

If the language used is anything but pleasin’
It must be highly objectionable to a person of reason
Even if objectionable and causing offense
Self-help is the first line of defense

Yet when Bailey actually spoke to the press
What do you think he didn’t address?
Those false light charges that so disturbed
Prompted from Bailey not a single word

So highly objectionable, it could not be
— Bailey was happy to hear his name on a CD

Bailey also admitted he was a bully in youth
Which makes what Marshall said substantial truth
This doctrine is a defense well known
And renders Bailey’s case substantially blown

The lyrics are stories no one should take as fact
They’re an exaggeration of a childish act
Any reasonable person could clearly see
That the lyrics can only be hyperbole

It is therefore this Court’s ultimate position
That Eminem is entitled to summary disposition

Makes me think I should be laying down some beats in my dissertation footnotes. Hmmm…what rhymes with “ibid”?

Had a bit of technical problems earlier this week over at my Video Store Project site. The trouble (corrupted mySQL index) is cleared up now, but this reminded me that I should mention it here, since many of y’all who’re reading might not know about it. If you’re curious, check it out, and if you remember the earlier days of home video, please do take 5 minutes and fill out a survey…

Ahhhh…I seem to have figured out the problem that was tripping up my dissertating. While I’m not entirely positive it hang together perfectly, I’ve got a good enough sense of how to restructure things that I’m able to start writing with a clear destination in mind. At this rate, I’ll have another chapter cranked out by next weekend…

It’s funny – if I get too far away from my material and spend too much time thinking about how to piece things together, the best thing to do is simply to dive back into my interviews and archival material, and ideas start jumping out at me (“Oh, right…that’s what I wanted to say!”). It’s a good feeling, which not only gets the writing juices flowing but also reminds me that I did an extensively good job back when I was researching this stuff in the first place…

Fascinating story today in Wired News on Amazon’s new book index:

“Amazon’s new archive is more densely populated than the early Web was, but it’s still far from complete. With its 120,000 titles, the archive has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new territory suddenly opens up.

“The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I’ve recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York’s most famous pillager of public money. Manber types “Boss Tweed” into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.

“From the Hamill reference, I link to a page in the afterward on which he cites books that influenced his portrait of Tweed. There, on the screen, is the cream of the research performed by a great metropolitan writer and editor. Some of the books Hamill recommends are out of print, but all are available either new or used on Amazon.”

I and many other academics already use Amazon to do general research, figuring out which books to read on a given subject (it’s more extensive than browsing the shelves of a university library, and the “Others who bought x also bought y“ feature is often more useful than Library of Congress subject headings). This new archive, however, has the potential to revolutionize historical scholarship in the same way that Lexis/Nexis changed the practice of content analysis within the field of Communication.

Interesting post by Ted over at Crooked Timber:

“I’ve been fascinated for a long time by this: quite a few black and Latino rappers fill their albums and videos with images of ostentatious, even cartoonish wealth. With the possible exception of Vanilla Ice rolling in his 5.0*, I’ve never seen a white rapper portray his success in a remotely similar way…”

Read the whole thing…

I guess I’ve hit the big times, now – just got hit with my first five pieces of comment spam. Within minutes I had Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin up and running, so that should take care of that. Anyone dealing with the same should check it out…

Two days into prepping to write the next dissertation chapter, I’m hitting a brick wall. Since I can’t seem to get anywhere doing “legitimate” writing, I figure I’ll try getting some ideas out here (and anyone reading who’s up on my dissertation, feel free to throw in your two cents).

So here’s my dilemma. The way I’d been conceptualizing my dissertation was as five chapters, each centering on a social group involved with the history of the VCR as an extension of the theater into the home: enthusiasts, distributors, retailers, employees, and consumers. That’s all well and good for the first chapter, which is kind of a stand-alone story in itself, as well as the last one (which is essentially about the resulting understanding of the VCR’s place in the home), but now that I’m wrestling with the next section, I’m finding that it’s not really so easy to separate distributors and retailers – in fact, the more I’ve thought about it and gone through research material, the more I realize that the two are interrelated to the point that discussing one without an equal emphasis on the other isn’t an option.

So, I’m trying to reconceptualize the outline of the middle few chapters – the best idea I’ve got going right now is to reframe the distributors/retailers stuff into two chapters: the first would be on the change in who’s actually distributing videotapes from the electronics industry/‘brown goods stores’ to the recording industry/‘video specialty stores’, while the second would be on the establishment of institutions by retailers and distributors that increased their power, while at the same time facilitating a greater sense of closure about what a video store (and by extension the role of the VCR in American life) should be. This way, I could still leave the last two chapters essentially the same (one on the intersection of the video store as a consumption junction with consumers, the other on the eventual role of the VCR and videotapes in the domestic space).

Here’s the problem – while the first of those “mediators” chapters (the one on electronics vs. recording industry technological frames) would have a strong, clear argument, I don’t have a foothold into the second one yet. Sinply arguing “Hey, look, these people built institutions” doesn’t really feel like it cuts it for me. Plus, I feel like I’d be backtracking to tell the story of video stores through the entry of Blockbuster only to then double back to the relationship of video clerks to consumers in the Mom and Pop video stores of the early 1980’s.

Argh. I guess I’ll go read through my interviews again, and see if anything jumps out at me…